Tag Archives: backpacks

I’ve always had a strange relationship with backpacks. I think I hate them. Maybe because I had to wear a backpack to school and I never really liked school, which in retrospect is completely ridiculous. I wish I could hop in a time machine and have a few words with high school freshman Julie to straighten her out. I totally phoned it in and only half absorbed what my teachers were telling me.
Biology was so interesting and fun—why was I more concerned with sneaking out to get a latte from Paradise Coffee on 8th Avenue and smoke Marlboro Lights with my friend Ulysses? English was my favorite subject (despite the major a-hole teacher) but I left every assignment to the day before deadline and handed them all in littered with errors and run-on sentences. Howard Zinn’s “The People’s History of the United States” was our US History textbook but I barely skimmed a few chapters and turned in every assignment late. My teacher claimed to be a former student of Zinn’s. (That same teacher ended up carrying on torrid affairs with students that ultimately cost him his job and probably his life. He died of a heart attack at 60. His 19-year-old girlfriend spoke at his memorial to a crowd of cringing mourners. It was odd.) But anyway, the motley crew of teachers should have been enough to pique my interest in school. Nope.

Luckily, I figured it all out in time to put myself through college and become a responsible adult. But I have to say—I did and do often wrestle with some of those bad habits. It takes plenty of foot dragging and hours of waiting around for me to finally get my own work done. Of course, I blame lazy parenting during my formative years for this. But let’s move on.

Now that I have a daughter, who I plan on tiger-mothering, I recognize and appreciate the usefulness of a backpack. I am still using the Baggu canvas duck bag, which can be worn cross-body so it frees up my hands but I end up doing the full one-arm scoop and search when I need something. It would be nice to have everything organized in…a…backpack. AAAHHH!

I have rounded up 6 backpacks that I would wear today and that don’t remind me of my black North Face from high school (although I should dig that one up—it is vintage at this point). Most of them have zippers or snaps because who has time to futz around with a complicated clasp situation when you have a toddler? Seriously.